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In April 2017 the UK Government unveiled its Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy (CWIS), the first binding legislation ensuring government investment in cycling and walking provision in England. CWIS commits 1.2 billion GBP of spending by 2020/2021, coming from central and local government as well as from local enterprise partnerships.
Frailty models
A population consists of individuals, each with their own genetics, lifestyle, and yes, their very own force of mortality. National mortality data, such as held by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are observed only at the population level and the variation in the force of mortality across individuals of the same age is forever hidden. The purpose of this blog is to show how we can attempt to model this hidden heterogeneity.
Changing patterns of mortality
In an earlier post we introduced the idea of the so-called curve of deaths, which is simply the distribution of age at death. This is intimately bound up with survival models and the idea of future lifetime as a random variable.
On the (funding) level
When I read Allan Martin's earlier blog on how pension-scheme reserves routinely fail to include expenses, I was so surprised I had to ask him if it was really true. As a former life-insurance actuary, any reserve which didn't include an allowance for expenses simply wasn't a complete assessment of the liability in my view.
Special Delivery
Drug molecules, without special intervention, don't apply only where we want them to. Indeed, late last year this fact landed pharmaceutical giant Reckitt Benckiser in trouble with the Australian regulator.
The alias problem
A problem that can crop up during mortality modelling is that of aliasing, specifically extrinsic aliasing. The situation can be illustrated by an example of the sort of data available for a pension scheme.
Top of the tree
What do civil servants and monkeys have in common (ignoring a purportedly greater than average interest in bananas)?
Division of labour
At this time of year insurers have commenced their annual valuation of liabilities, part of which involves setting a mortality basis. When doing so it is common for actuaries to separate the basis into two components.
Habit (re)forming
Behavioural risk factors such as smoking and excessive alcohol consumption are significant drivers of mortality and morbidity.
Season's Greetings to all our readers!
\[y = \frac{\log_e\left(\frac{x}{m}-sa\right)}{r^2}\]
\[\Rightarrow yr^2 = \log_e\left(\frac{x}{m}-sa\right)\]
\[\Rightarrow e^{yr^2} = \frac{x}{m}-sa\]
\[\Rightarrow me^{yr^2} = x-msa\]
\[\Rightarrow me^{rry} = x-mas\]